In the interiors, particularly the bar and the banquet hall at the top of the hotel, Sullivan’s ornament changed even more markedly than his exterior design. Here also there is possibly Richardsonian influence, but coming from the Byzantinizing detail worked out by John Galen Howard of the Richardson office for the MacVeagh house of 1885-7 in Chicago rather than from the Field store.
However, one cannot entirely discount the possibility of a contribution in the field of ornament by a brilliant young man of twenty, Frank Lloyd Wright, whom Sullivan and Adler had just taken on as a draughtsman in 1887 and who was soon given charge of the innumerable detail drawings that this vast project required. Nurtured on Owen Jones’s Grammar of Ornament,[[312]] which the Paris-trained Sullivan claimed not to have known, as well as on the writings of Ruskin, Morris, and Viollet-le-Duc, Wright may perhaps have encouraged Sullivan to move away from the bold coarseness of his earlier ornament towards the lush elaboration of intricately plastic surface decoration henceforth characteristic of his work. It is tempting, even, to believe that Jones’s page of Celtic ornament particularly attracted the Irish Sullivan’s fancy.[[313]]
Together with the Auditorium, though commissioned a year later, there was also rising in Chicago in 1887-9 the Tacoma Building of William Holabird (1854-1923) and Martin Roche (1855-1927), two young architects trained in Jenney’s office. Here the exterior walls on the two fronts were entirely carried by the metal skeleton within, only the rear walls and some of the interior partitions being of bearing masonry like the walls of the Auditorium. Moreover, this fact was made evident in the frank if not particularly distinguished treatment of the two fronts. Vertical ranges of oriels were carried the full height of the building, and there was only a minimal brick and terracotta sheathing of the structural verticals and horizontals. A more or less Richardsonian cornice capped the whole, but the general effect was closer to Ellis’s Oriel Chambers of the sixties in Liverpool or to some of Sullivan’s earlier buildings than to the Field store.
Despite the general swing of Eastern architects towards the Neo-Academic in these years, some who were doing commercial work were not out of step with what was happening in Chicago. For example, there are office buildings and warehouses in Boston and New York of relatively modest height built in the late eighties and early nineties that emulate in brick the arcading of the Field store with almost as much success as Sullivan. Similar things can be seen in many Middle and Far Western cities, but these derive more probably from Sullivan or Burnham & Root than directly from Richardson.
In the Middle West, moreover, McKim, Mead & White were building in 1888-90 two very large business buildings, still with bearing masonry walls, for the New York Life Insurance Company, one in Omaha, Nebraska, and one in Kansas City, Missouri, of effectively identical design. Unlike the already characteristic Chicago ‘slabs’—the quadrangular plan of the Rookery Building is exceptional—these are U-shaped, and each has a tower rising above the main mass at the rear of the court. The treatment of the walls with tall arcading follows as evidently from the Field store as does Sullivan’s at the Auditorium; like that of the contemporary Boston Public Library, however, the fairly simple detailing is of High Renaissance rather than Richardsonian Romanesque character.
Before these towering blocks were finished in the West the new ‘skyscraper construction’ had been introduced in New York by Bradford Lee Gilbert (1853-1911). His Tower Building of 1888-9, as its name implies, was a tower, not a slab, with more or less Richardsonian detailing. It is worth noting that the Tower Building—ten storeys, 119 feet—was not as tall as the first New York skyscrapers built in the early seventies with bearing walls. Indeed, Post’s World or Pulitzer Building of 1889-90 in New York with twenty-six storeys, the tallest built up to then—309 feet—still had bearing walls. Of course, the Eiffel Tower, completed in 1889, exceeded in height by a great deal all the skyscrapers of its day whatever their construction; indeed, it was not overtopped until the Empire State Building in New York rose from the designs of Shreve, Lamb & Harmon in the early 1930s at the end of the second wave of skyscraper building following the First World War.
Post’s Western Union Building of the early seventies was in the Second Empire mode; his World Building was still French, but what can better be called ‘Beaux-Arts’. It is designed like a series of three- or four-storey Renaissance palaces, one on top of the other, and crowned with a large and ornate dome. The next New York skyscrapers all followed the new structural method introduced by Gilbert in the Tower Building; but Post, Price, and the other architects who designed them used an ornate paraphernalia of Renaissance ornamentation with none of the discretion of McKim, Mead & White on their Kansas City and Omaha insurance buildings. Characteristic of the period are Price’s American Surety Building at Broadway and Wall Street, begun in 1894, and his St James Building of 1897-8 at 1133 Broadway, both in New York, and Post’s Park Building in Pittsburgh, completed in 1896. The latter’s Havemeyer Building in New York, completed earlier, in 1892, was still somewhat Richardsonian however.
The maturing of an original sort of skyscraper design around 1890 is a Middle Western, and almost specifically a Chicago, story to which New York architects made no contribution. Boston’s architectural leadership had ended with the death of Richardson; despite the prominence of McKim, Mead & White and their large Eastern following, leadership in this field passed almost at once to Chicago. It was most appropriate that Richardson’s masterpiece, the Field store, should have been built there; the inspiration it provided, as we have already seen in the case of the Auditorium Building, played an important part in the succeeding Middle Western development.
In 1889-90 Jenney built for Levi Z. Leiter a large building on South Clark Street in Chicago now occupied by Sears, Roebuck & Company. In this he not only used the new ‘skyscraper construction’ for the exterior walls but also—with the presumptive aid of his assistant and later partner William Bryce Mundie (1863-1939)—arrived at an expression of its structural character almost as logical as that of the Tacoma Building yet much more monumental. Like most other Chicago designers in these years, Jenney and Mundie were influenced here by the Field store. The uncompromisingly block-like shape of this tremendous building, with its heavy plain entablature and pilaster-like corner piers, is Richardsonian both in its scale and in its simplicity (Plate [117B]). The various groupings of stone mullions that clad the main piers and subdivide the bays, lithe and light though they are, were clearly envisaged as Romanesque colonnettes and even carry modest foliate capitals. Despite the dichotomy of the solidly Richardsonian silhouette and the open screen-like treatment of the walls, the effect is coherent and dignified. In this respect the Sears, Roebuck Building is superior to Sullivan’s very Richardsonian[[314]] Opera House Building in Pueblo, Colorado, of 1890 which was burned in the 1920s. The Walker Warehouse in Chicago of 1888-9 better displayed his great talent.
Three buildings of the early nineties, two in Chicago by Daniel H. Burnham’s firm and one in St Louis by Sullivan, illustrate the wide range of creative possibilities in skyscraper design at this point. The most advanced is surely the Reliance Building, at least in terms of direct structural expression. This was carried up only four storeys in 1890, though extended to its present thirteen storeys by D. H. Burnham & Company in 1894. As completed, this is a refined and perfected version of Holabird & Roche’s Tacoma Building (Plate [115B]). The light-coloured terracotta cladding of the vertical members, particularly on the flat oriels, is reduced to a minimum; the terminal member is a thin slab, not a cornice or an entablature; and the only stylistic reminiscence is in the cusped panelling—neither Romanesque nor Renaissance, but slightly Late Gothic in character—of the spandrels. What we see was presumably designed as well as built in 1894.[[315]]